I've heard from both Rick Schloss [67] and Warren Van Camp [68] that both of these classes are having their 40th reunions next year, and would like me to try to get the rest of the Catamounts from 67 and 68 years at least up on the website, so I got a good start at least, putting two up yesterday... the Thanksgiving edition Volume 12, No.5, and the pre-christmas-dance Volume 12 No. 6. If any former Cougars have old Catamounts that fall "in the cracks" between the issues I have, and would like to scan them and send them to me, I'll post them. I'm thinking on the 67/68, that I may go ahead and update the page for that school year showing the ones I have and the ones missing, so people can look through old boxes and hopefully find some of the additional ones. [The above was corrected on 11;22;007 - Thanks to Warren for a few corrections about who was which year and that both reunions are next year!]

Co-incidental this morning I got an email from Tobias Deml, a fellow in Austria [thought I fixed this earlier!] researching the "Third Wave", and I was able to point him to the article about Ron Jones in Volume 12 No. 6. Of course there's a lot of interesting stuff about the "firing" or "resignation" of Jones in the 68/69 school year which also had principal Dave Stanard as a casualty, but which also allowed Wim Roberson to come in as a very humble and dedicated interim principal to get us through our last weeks at Cubberley. [Tobias wanted the principals' names, which brought all this to mind].

This Thanksgiving edition, I remember quite well. As photographers, we were "supposed" to come up with *something* special and big for the cover of the Catamount, but none of us "upcoming" photographers came up with anything that pleased the Catamount Editors, hence they reprinted a great Scott LeGear photo of a turkey on the front cover with the headline "Cubberley's Grand Old Gobbler". I remember us getting chewed out for not coming up with anything new. Actually, I'm kind of glad we didn't - because Scott was (and is) a very talented photographer, and now I've still got a copy of the turkey picture.

Bob Warford's column (Bob's also emailed me - hi Bob!) mentions something that reminded me of a photo in my files - Bob wrote in this column "Bug the bug... As you've probably heard, a small wreck of a car with the minimum of work put into it won the "Decorated Car" bit for the Paly Game. Cub never ceases to amaze me. How eleven responsible people could pick this car over all the others because it had a sign that read "Bug Paly" is appalling. A lot of hard work went into a lot of cars and it was all wasted because somebody was "Cute". (Besides I lost)".

So now I'll have to go try to find that photo of the bug with the "Bug Paly" sign on it.

The December 8 edition announces the "Fritz Rabyne Memorial Christmas Dance" (that's the one where Stevie Nicks performed as part of that band in pre Fleetwood Mac days - I've gone back and listened to some old Fleetwood Mac stuff - those people were/are very talented! Also seen some of Stevie on Soundstage. Great stuff!

The December 8 edition also describes Ron Jones doing more experiments where he says he's a "regional head of the Student's Democratic Society," [I think there's supposed to be a "for" in there]... and also in the National Guard, which he said had been "infiltrated" by people including himself, in order to have a huge Christmas Day demonstration in Washington. Jones was quoted as saying "In 1964, some people got together and formed the SDS. We got short hair cuts, joined the National Guard, and got jobs as teachers. At Cubberley, there are three other 'undercover' teachers besides myself." I remember our Journalism teacher at the time telling us she wasn't sure if Jones was serious or not, but that we should keep an eye on things in case there was s story or a photo to be taken. There's a rather odd photo of Jones, arms folded, pulled back from his desk looking (I think) perplexed and perhaps defiant.

Now I've got to go find that car picture... Aha! found it! . Hmm... did that evolve into a PT cruiser?

I was disappointed to not have Volume 12 number 1, the first Catamount I have from 67/68 is number two - dated October 6, 1967.

It's been a long time since I've touched the site - mostly because I've started consulting again, so trying to do a Catamount in an afternoon is no longer possible most of the time.

This has been kind of fun in terms of contact with interesting people - Gayne Barlow (daughter of my 7th grade science teacher at Wilbur Junior High, and in my graduating class) and I have exchanged some emails. My wife found a "biography" of Mr. Barlow that I wrote back in 8th grade (English assignment) that is a hoot to read, and Gayne and her family apparently enjoyed it as well. Since other of Claude Barlow's former students might find this fun, I put it up on the site as well. That particular paper was written when I was in Mrs. Wolfrom's class in 8th grade, also at Wilbur Junior High. (If Wendy Lesser should happen to read this, I believe Mrs. Wolfrom was the teacher whose name you couldn't remember that you wrote about in "The Amateur"./

8th grade English at Wilbur was (for me) an interesting class - Mrs. Wolfrom wanted to teach us using "linguistics" rather than traditional grammer, which I really enjoyed. The teacher the next year (Mrs. Forbush) was of the old school "grammer", but after those two classes, I found I could pretty much analyze and parse anything thrown at me. The exposure to linguistics made it easier later to learn more about computer languages as well. These two teachers were opposites in many ways, but I learned a lot from both of them. Mrs. Wolfrom's class *did* have a - shall we say - "hiccup", which I think was what precipitated events leading to Wendy's comments in "The Amateur" and that was because we had a reading specialist come in periodically that many of the students didn't care for. He was armed with things like SRA reading labs and tachistoscopes (darn - no Wikipedia article on that - it's a device that flashes things like words up for very short periods of time - it was supposed to help us read faster). Anyway, there was a revolt of sorts by the students in our class, and as I recall Wendy was one of the ringleaders... and he went away and didn't ever come back, which probably put Mrs. Wolfrom in an awkward position. I thought the tachistiscope was kind of fun actually.

I also exchanged emails with former Catamount columnist Doug Monica who graduated a year ahead of me. (Doug's mom and my mom were good friends - I think they both worked on the Pete McCloskey campaigns - back in the 70s. I got to drive him (Congressman McCloskey) to the airport once on a messy rainy night back in my college days. His son and I were at UCSB at the same time).

I slso got email from a teacher in Palo Alto who is doing a wonderful site on Palo Alto history. Check it out at http://www.paloaltohistory.com/.

Much of what is covered in this issue of the Catamount that I just put up is covered in former Cubberley English/Journalism teacher Sylvia Williams' book Hassling (hardcover) , or Hassling (paperback) which she wrote in the early 70s. It is out of print, but if you follow the links you might find a used copy.

I've been doing sort of "topic pages" on each edition of the Catamount because hopefully that will help searchers to find things easier - especially since the optical PDFs sometimes garble things up. (Yikes, I'm repeating myself!)

I was in Palo Alto last weekend, and stopped by Cubberley to have a look at the place... it's amazing how much of it looks the same.

Especially since I've been trying to catalog the ads in the old Catamounts, I also went over to Charleston Center to look around (and pick up an Ice Cream) at the still-well-attended ice cream store (photo from 1967 or so).



I also popped my head in the barber shop to see if Tony was still in there - he is! I remember Tony from one of the Midtown barber shope (I think it was the one by Round Table), and then he moved down and took over the business at Charleston Center. My dad used to ask for him specifically, and Tony always took good care of his hair.

I promised Tony I would upload this photo he helped me set up back in probably 1968 or 1969.



The three teachers had all grown beards over the summer, and I think the story was that Mr. Dale (left) and Mr. Warford (right) were going to keep their beards, and the apprehensive-looking Mr. Putnum (in chair) was going to shave his off. We didn't "have it off" right there in the barbershop, but this was sure fun to set up.

Both the ice cream store and the barber shop were faithful advertisers in the Catamount when I was in high school. The ice cream store looks quite a bit the same - they manufacture their own ice cream, and it's great! I don't know if they make it there onsite, or if they do it elsewhere, but we sure enjoyed ours.

I just noticed this was almost exactly 40 years ago, and probably one of the most eventful times at Cubberley.

Two notorious experiments are outlined
- Ron Jones and the Third Wave (now popularly known as "The Wave", or "Die Welt" due to popularized (and rather revised and enhanced) written and film accounts of what actually happened.
- Idea Forum. An idea for an alternative school within a school.

I wasn't part of the Third Wave - I took the same course "Contemporary World", but it was taught by a different teacher (I had Al Chanteloupe). It was no secret, though, as has been suggested a few places. I, along with a couple of other folks, took a few photos of the classroom in a little-known noctournal break-in to the room (actually we got a janitor to let us in)... But lots of other folks know a lot more about the "Third Wave" than I do, though, so I'll present the document such as it is, and leave most of the comments to others who were there.

"Idea Forum" was a lot of fun. Anybody could run a class, and you could attend any you were interested in. This Catamount edition listed the offerings of the pilot program. Duriing IF, I remember going to a class on Swahili, one on matrices (mathematics), and one on how to get rich in the stock market (Thanks, Mr. Farmer... which I didn't(get rich, that is)). The great photo of Sallie Neall (she was a really nice girl - in lots of my classes and a good friend) in a sandwich board shows the enthusiasm with which this idea was embraced by many of us.

This one also mentions the famous Cubberley "Buffalo Springfield / Sopwith Camel" concert. Apparently at Deena Bonn Sports Night, there was a performance by "The California Girls", which I'm not sure has anything to do with the band by that name today. I did notice in an earlier version of the Catamount that Addie Clement (who used to live on Carlson Circle) was one of the members back then.

There's a photo of Bill Perry (taken by Yours Truly) who did the artwork for the Springfield/Camel concert, and there's a miniature version of the original psychedelic poster on the bottom of page 2.

Doug Monica's account of the San Francisco Mobilization to protest the Viet Nam conflict is gripping first-hand history.

I just got Volume 11, No. 10 up on the website. I'm trying to put some useful text into the "headlines" page I do for each edition to make things show up in search engines... (so in case someone googles around looking for information about something related, they will hopefully find my content). It's kind of hard to read all the articles and summarize, though. Still experimenting with this.

There is what appears to be a rather dumb mistake regarding an exchange student on page 3 - the headline reads "Americans Amaze German Exchanger"... and in the article, it says "...Carlo Putz, Cubberley's AFS exchange student from Reckange, *Luxembourg*. I remember Carlo slightly - to the best of my recollection, I thought he was from Germany myself. Undoubtedly he was German-speaking which probably confused things to people not familiar with European geography.

This reminds me of something that happened to me later in life. I made a visit with a mission-board representative to Liberia in West Africa. When meeting with one of the national Christian leaders over there, he asked us the question... "What did your friends say when you said you were coming to Liberia?". I had one that sent him into one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard - someone had told me I had better "watch out for Gaddafi". (One of my friends didn't know the difference between Libya and Liberia).

There's a photo of Neil Howe reading a journalism book. I made the connection to what Neil does today from an HP Labs seminar he gave several years ago, where he mentioned that he went through the Palo Alto schools.